Volvo's New Model Line

Does Volvo's Brand New XC90 Give Us A Glimpse At The Future Of Cars?

Electrics and boutique supercars are often start-from-scratch projects, but big-brand vehicles typically carry some kind of production baggage with them. The XC90 is one of those rare cars to make a clean break from the previous generation.

Today, a first edition of Volvo’s new XC90 SUV goes on sale. It’s the first of the company's new models to have been completely rebuilt: new engine, new aesthetic, new architecture, new safety and entertainment systems. It's also the first Volvo in more than a decade to be completely pure-bred. If you had bought one 10 years ago, when the company was owned by Ford, you would have driven home Frankenstein: a mishmash of automotive parts borrowed from other Ford-owned brands (for example, many Volvo models used the same “C1” platform that Ford built their Focus and Mazda 3 on). But upon being acquired by China’s Geely company in 2010, Volvo resumed planning and building their cars their way. Now, four years later, the first of them was revealed at a launch event in Stockholm last week. We'll see the rest of the new model line emerge between now and 2017; as Volvo president Hakan Samuelsson declared at the launch, the XC90 is "the first new car from a new Volvo car company."

The XC90 is also one of those rare cars to make a clean break from the previous generation. Electrics and boutique supercars are often start-from-scratch projects, but big-brand vehicles typically carry some kind of production baggage with them — a carry-over chassis, for example. The XC90, however, started with a blank page. And because of its neat separation from the past, it gives us a glimpse into how Volvo designers and engineers imagine we'll be driving in the immediate future. These are the emerging driving trends that they’re betting on.

Semi-Autonomous Cars

Gradually gotten used to the prospect of one day sitting inside a self-driving car? Good. Now you can start getting some practice. The XC90 isn’t completely autonomous, but it's the most self-sufficient car you'll see on the road these days. Its’ “queue assist” functionality liberates you from doing pretty much anything when jammed in stop-and-go traffic; the car maintains its own spacing, braking and accelerating and steering. It can also take care of itself backing into a parking space and parallel parking, thank you very much. This Volvo can't pick you up, like that one in the concept video that we all goggled at last year. But a bunch of other neat automated touches, like a trunk door that opens when you wave your foot under the rear bumper, gives you the sense that there soon won't be many nonautomated gaps left to fill.

Driver Override

A lot of the XC90’s automated technology was designed with passenger safety in mind. Volvo is, after all, the safety company — the first car manufacturer to introduce safety glass in windshields and the three-point seatbelt, among other innovations. Furthermore, they have publicly declared that by the year 2020, no passenger will be killed or seriously injured in a Volvo vehicle. They refer to this promise as "Vision 2020," and their approach to fulfilling it is to hinge their new safety features on the assumption that humans do not react quickly enough. So rather than trust that you will see a veering cyclist in time to slam on the brakes, the XC90 will do it for you, and it will tighten your seatbelt just before it does so to make sure you don't get a jolt. This "City Safety" automatic braking system also detects and reacts to pedestrians and other vehicles. If another car comes roaring up behind you, the XC90 will tighten up its’ passengers’ seat belts and start flashing its rear lights in warning at the approaching driver (one imagines with some frustration that it can't just take over driving for him as well).